Dear Me: A Letter to My Teenage Self

Remember when you lay face down in the carpet crying, “God if you’re real, show me”? You were thirteen, questioning, as is your way, everything you’d been taught in Sunday School.

God met you there, in the middle of that shag carpet. Quiet but unmistakable. You didn’t “see” anything, but you knew in a way that marked you forever. In a way you could never forget. Not even years later when you would try to wipe it from your mind.

And that’s what I’m writing you about, dear Me.

You’re a freshman in college. God is so real, he’s almost tangible. You’re talking to him always, and he’s talking back. He’s your best friend, only better.

The sweetness of God, He’s spilling out everywhere. You can’t contain it. Girls in the dorm are knocking on your door, bringing their pain and leaving with hope. They’re carrying notes you’ve written to remind them of truth.

But part of you is always looking — scanning faces in the lecture hall, shadowy figures at the party — for the guy who will fill that gap, that little place of emptiness. You hope it will be him, or maybe him. It’s a blur of faces.

But you find him in the summer of your freshman year. All blonde and tan with abs to die for, your surfer boy dream come true. Amazingly he falls for you. Hard.

It’s classic summer romance, boats and beach, sun and surf, handholding in moonlight. At the end of the summer, he leaves for his Marine post, the other side of the world for a year.

He doesn’t own a Bible, but he promises to read one. You give him yours, the one you used to read every day.

He writes you. Every day for 365 days. You write him back. He sends a huge portrait of the two of you. He had it painted from a photograph. You hang it in your dorm room above the bed.

He tells you he joined a Bible study. And he’s praying. He talks to you about God. The missing piece falls into place.

You make plans long distance. He comes home and they come true. You graduate. He makes it into the prestigious MBA program.

The spring before his graduation you’re doing the yuppie couple thing at South Street Seaport, talking Wall Street futures. The guys brag carat sizes for engagement rings. You’ve both talked marriage for years, and now it‘s finally time.

But somewhere in there is an important part I skipped. Somewhere in there you leave God out. You don’t just neglect Him, you cross him off your list.

You come to that fork in the road — or maybe there were many forks — and you choose your perfect guy. Perfect except he doesn’t have God in his life, and even you can’t deny it any more.

At first you agonize. You wish you had never said that prayer face down in the carpet. You wish God had never shown himself. That you didn’t now see His face hovering, His shadow blotting out your happiness, making you choose.

You try to walk on both sides of the fence, holding God with one hand and your dream with the other. But you’re so tired of holding out your arms this way, so tired of being pulled apart. So you let go.

You let go God’s hand, but God doesn’t let you go.

Maybe this is why you can’t say yes. Even though you’ve checked all the boxes in your dream man checklist. Maybe you just know the cracks in this perfect picture. Maybe it’s the arguments, the temper and tears you try to ignore.

It’s hard to make a clean break when you’ve become so entwined. But one day you emerge from the wreckage that was your dream.

The years spin out, Godless and fast. Your castles crumble and wash out to sea. You stumble back, and find yourself face down in the carpet once again.

I’m writing, dear Me, to tell you

It doesn’t have to be this way. Deal with that one thing. Before you reach the fork in the road.

Enjoy those days of sweetness with your Savior and don’t ever let go.

Friday I’m linking up with Emily Freeman to celebrate her new book, Graceful. It was written for a girl like my teenage self, the good girl who got tired of trying.

Random Life

At some point in our most desperate prayers we have to rally. Because when you get to the bottom of your barrel, when you’re scraping out the dregs, when you have less than nothing, you can see him. It’s easier to surrender all when we have nothing. And absolute surrender is how we see him. […]

I’m sitting next to him on the sofa, but he might as well be miles away. We’re discussing an issue, and the conversation has reached an impasse. Where do we go from here? It’s not really a good time to talk. Life is pressing. He has an appointment. I have things to do. We can […]

They’re a conservative Christian family. Church on Sundays, Bible reading every night. Born again. They’re looking for a church where their teen boys can fit in. But they’ve had a hard time finding a church that would accept them, one that isn’t a gay church, that is. I was talking to my old college roommate. […]

The kid in the first row, sitting up straight with hands folded, eyes on the teacher — that was me (long ago when students did such things). I know how to meet expectations. I can sense people’s expectations a mile away, and I have this morbid fear of disappointing anyone, of dropping the ball. This […]

It’s only a body. That’s what I said when we talked about death, mine in particular. I pictured my body in a bed (how often do people actually die in a bed?) and my spirit, the real me slipping away, suddenly untethered from its bodily constraints. Free at last. I won’t be there, I said. […]

Reads

A disciple’s look at five loaves and two fish. Luke 9:10-17 Crowds. I see them in my dream. Bodies, faces, sweat and heat. And hands, so many hands, reaching and clutching. Jesus had sent us out with the power to preach and heal. What a privilege. What a responsibility. We’re home now, pressing through yet […]

Musing on Genesis 4 Other People Cain is worried about people taking revenge for the murder of his brother, Abel. Is he talking about his father and mother? A sister? Brothers yet to be born? Does Cain take one of his sisters with him as his wife or are there people we don’t know about […]

Musing on Genesis 2 On Day 6, God gets his hands dirty. He forms a man out of the dust, gets his face in there and breathes his very own breath into the man’s nostrils. God and man face to face, up close and personal. The earth needs a man to cultivate it, and God […]

The killing had been quick and easy. Too easy. Abel had suspected nothing and offered no resistance. In a moment the light had gone out of his brother’s eyes, “like one of his sacrificial lambs,” Cain thought, but immediately he dismissed it from his mind. He had just finished washing his hands. The dirt from […]

Musing on Genesis 2 How could evil exist in Paradise? Apparently the issue was not the existence of evil, but familiarity — touching, seeing, experiencing it. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil gave man the opportunity to know good and evil. Prior to that, man knew only good, but in the absence […]